Author Archives: brendano

An two-step explanation for distrust of science: (1) journalists write up poor science or take out the evidence and information from a scientific study, then (2) people read that and criticize science for being unfounded, arbitrary, etc. Link. Some fun … Continue reading →

Bush job approval ratings by different polling houses. Link. Does aggregation across different polls make sense like this? Interesting general trend as well…

Ray Kurzweil interviewed on his new book, The Singularity Is Near. Good points on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, nanotech and the like. But man, I thought Age of Spiritual Machines was a bit wacky… Complete model of the human brain by … Continue reading →

Rational choice has been a huge imperialistic success, growing in popularity and being applied to more and more fields. Why is this? It’s not because the rational choice model of decision-making is particularly realistic. Rather, it’s because rational choice is … Continue reading →

Upload your poker hand histories to www.pokernomics.com, economist Stephen Levitt’s fringe-of-economics project to study what are effective strategies in poker. This absolultely makes sense to me as an economics research project, only because I’m used to thinking of economics from … Continue reading →

This is a revision of my earlier post. In Jaynes’ awesome statistical manifesto book (another link), I just saw for the second time the odds ratio form of Bayes’ rule, which is a lot cleaner for this sort of static … Continue reading →

I must have seen a zillion draft versions of this study floating around online, but here’s a terrific preprint: “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies (Henrich, Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Fehr, Gintis, McElreath, Alvard, Barr, Ensminger, … Continue reading →

From the same site, this is fun.

What a project — an impressively painstaking compilation of 20th century civilian and military casualties. Summary: lots of people were killed. Interesting are the comments on morality and how prejudgement leads to differing casualty estimations — estimates vary wildly for … Continue reading →

Looks like it’s become a mini-series: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has hit PBS! Great book, if repetitive and a little too ambitious — he has a great environmental/technology explanation of the differences in societal development between Europe and … Continue reading →